Dave Rogers
Hewson's house composer, and the man who wrote Stormlord's music
Wrote the Spectrum music for Cybernoid, Cybernoid II and Stormlord — three of the platform's most-cited beeper scores, widely and wrongly credited to Tim Follin. CRASH, Your Sinclair and Cecco's own development diary all name Rogers.
Dave Rogers wrote the Spectrum music for Raffaele Cecco’s Hewson games — the scores that are routinely held up as the high-water mark of what the Spectrum’s one-bit beeper could be made to do.
They are also routinely credited to somebody else.
The evidence
Three independent period sources, all naming Rogers:
Cybernoid. CRASH, October 1988, reporting on Cybernoid II’s progress, describes incorporating “the new music soundtrack by Dave Rogers (who also put together the original Cybernoid tune)”.
Cybernoid II. Your Sinclair’s preview prints the credit block outright:
Graphics and code — Rafaelle Cecco. Music — Dave Rogers.
Stormlord. Cecco’s Log, the development diary CRASH ran while Cecco built the game, records the delivery in January 1989: “sound effects and music for Stormlord from Dave Rogers. I hastily incorporate them into the program to have a listen.”
Searching the Spectrum press held in this library for Stormlord alongside Follin returns nothing at all.
What Tim Follin did do
Tim Follin is a genuinely extraordinary Spectrum composer and none of this diminishes him — the point is only that these particular games are not his. The corpus credits him with Agent X, and Sinclair User in November 1989 sets out the Software Creations arrangement on Ghouls & Ghosts: programming by Mike Follin, music and sound effects by Tim Follin, additional sounds by Geoff Follin. Three brothers on one game. He also scored Bionic Commando and LED Storm for U.S. Gold, both of which reached CRASH’s music chart.
Why the mix-up matters here
The Shadowkeep curriculum sets its audio bar by reference to these games. A bar described as “Tim Follin’s Cybernoid II music” points at the right sound and the wrong person, and if the reference is going to be cited it should be cited correctly.
It is also the ordinary fate of game composers. Where programmers of this period appear on dozens or hundreds of pages of the Spectrum press — Steve Turner on 120, Matthew Smith on 88, Cecco on 44 — the composers appear on single figures. Rogers is credited in passing, inside somebody else’s diary, in a preview’s small print. That is how the attribution came loose in the first place.